THE 18 bills that comprise the carbon tax package will be introduced into Parliament today with changes to clarify its economic objectives and to give the Government discretion to exempt some medical gases, such as asthma sprays, from the scheme.

Eighteen Bills forming the Clean Energy Future package will be presented to the House of Representatives today, with debate set to start tomorrow, The Australian said.

Leader of the House Anthony Albanese said the Lower House was expected to pass the Bills on October 12 before the Senate, which will sit for an extra week this year, debates them and passes them in early November.

Climate Change Minister Greg Combet told Parliament today there had been considerable debate since the Government released the full details of its Clean Energy Future plan two months ago.

THE 18 bills that comprise the carbon tax package will be introduced into Parliament today with changes to clarify its economic objectives and to give the Government discretion to exempt some medical gases, such as asthma sprays, from the scheme.

Eighteen Bills forming the Clean Energy Future package will be presented to the House of Representatives today, with debate set to start tomorrow, The Australian said.

Leader of the House Anthony Albanese said the Lower House was expected to pass the Bills on October 12 before the Senate, which will sit for an extra week this year, debates them and passes them in early November.

Climate Change Minister Greg Combet told Parliament today there had been considerable debate since the Government released the full details of its Clean Energy Future plan two months ago.

Cyclones, fires and storms predicted Forecasters say Queensland most at risk La Niña won't be as powerful, but still a threat

Yasi bears down on Australia. The cyclone caused untold damage to Queensland and there are fears the state will suffer further damage from severe weather this summer. Picture: Japan Meteorological Agency

AUSTRALIANS have been warned there is no room for complacency this summer, with weather forecasters making predictions of bushfires, cyclones, torrential rain and severe thunderstorms.

Queenslanders, still recovering from last summer's disasters, have been told to brace themselves for threats from multiple fronts.

Fire crews across the country, from the northern fringes of Victoria right up to the tropical north, are on alert amid fears huge tracts of dry vegetation - overgrown thanks to the big wet of last summer - could ignite.

Bureau of Meteorology deputy director-general Bruce Gunn yesterday told a closed-door briefing of Cabinet ministers that at least four cyclones could form in the Coral Sea and may cross the Queensland coast.

Thunderstorms look likely to batter Queensland's southeast while the state's north and parts of NT could be swamped by heavy tropical downpours and an above-average number of cyclones.

The return of La Niña means increased rain in the north and east of the country and cooler temperatures.

However, forecasters believe this year’s event should little impact on Tasmania, Western Australia or the southern parts of South Australia and Victoria.

Tom Saunders, senior meteorologist for the Weather Channel, said: "If ocean temperatures continue to cool through the Pacific over the coming months, causing the La Niña to become stronger, then Australia can expect a very wet summer with frequent flood events.

But in what will come as a relief to flood-weary Australians, he said: "These events are unlikely to be of the catastrophic levels of last summer."

Fish-lovers in northern Europe will have to grapple with some unfamiliar names as the greenhouse effect accelerates.

Biologists overnight report that warmer seas are causing a remarkable turnover in commercially caught species off Britain, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands and northwest France.

Cold-water species such as the Atlantic cod that were a staple two generations ago are losing out but warm-loving species such as the dab and John dory are doing well, their study suggests.

The paper analyses 11 surveys of catches of bottom-trawled fish in a million square kilometres on northeastern Europe's continental shelf, comprising the North Sea, Irish Sea and the northern Bay of Biscay.

Relatively shallow, these seas have warmed by between 0.72 and 1.31 degrees Celsius over the 28 years from 1980-2008, or four times the global average.

To the lay person, a warming of this magnitude may seem trivial. But temperature has a big impact on maturation of fish eggs, the growth and survival of larvae and on the plankton on which fisheries ultimately depend.

Out of 50 species that were studied most closely, 36 showed a significant response to temperature during the 28 years. Twenty-seven of those species saw an increase in abundance.

Catches of cold-loving species dropped by half but those of warm-loving species doubled.

"We see many more southerly, warm-water species faring well on the European shelf than more northerly, cold-adapted species," said Stephen Simpson of the University of Bristol, western England, who led the probe. "This means more small-bodied, faster-growing species with shorter generation times, and potentially more diversity."

The data is based on roughly 100 million fish from 177 species that were brought in by commercial trawlers.Several species, especially cod, have been hammered by over-fishing since the end of World War II. But Mr Simpson said the study had not been skewed by using catch data.

His team used a "grid" approach, which was able to zoom into small areas of sea to look at catches species by species and year by year, and see how this compared with the local change in sea temperature.

That way, the impact of fishing could be taken into account in calculating populations, he said.

"The most intense fishing in European waters happened really between 1950 and 1980. It has fallen quite substantially since then as a result of the (European) Common Fisheries Policy," Mr Simpson said by phone.

"We're certainly convinced that what we're seeing is a response to warming, not to fishing."

He said, over time, with strong management and a smart response to consumer demand, European seas had the potential to be a good and sustainable fishery in a warmer world.

He said that fishermen in the southwestern English county of Cornwall were already exploiting a market for the once-exotic red gurnard.

"Five years ago, they sold it for 50 pence a fish to crab fishermen for their pots as bait. Now it's sold to gourmet restaurants for STG5 ($7.70) a fish."

The study appears in Current Biology, one of the US-based Cell group of science journals.

AS if Al Gore’s last apocalyptic PowerPoint presentation wasn’t boring and deceptive enough, he had to go and do it all again - for a marathon 24 hours.

A farrago of spurious connections, misrepresented facts and conspiracy theories as outlandish as any doomsday cult’s, the former US vice-president’s “climate reality project”, finally ended 10am on Friday.

“The climate crisis is happening now and it’s happening fast” was the message.

Gore and 24 presenters whizzed through slides of bushfires in Victoria and Russia, floods in Queensland and Pakistan, droughts in Texas and France, drowning people in China, starving children in Africa, singed koalas in Australia.

Every extreme weather event for the past year was due to man-made global warming and much worse is to come.

“The new normal is setting in ... It’s the planet telling us we can expect more wacky weather in the decades to come if we don’t do something about climate change.”

The only way to stop the climate crisis is to heed the oracle Gore.

That we haven’t is all the fault of evil “climate deniers” in the pay of Big Energy, who create “potentially deadly doubts about the reality of the climate crisis”, and give “the appearance of a debate where there is none”.

The most insidious aspect of Gore’s presentation was the way it targeted those who don’t buy his superstitious nonsense, blaming them for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in what used to be called natural disasters.

It was hate speech posing as reasonableness and sound thinking. Gore essentially incites hatred against those who dissent from his evangelical thesis, which once looked so plausible.

Ever since the over-hyped 2009 Copenhagen climate summit flopped, opinion polls show the wheels have fallen off the climate alarm bandwagon.

This is what happens to the boy who cries wolf. No one listens any more.

In Gore’s world, there are no scientists who don’t march in lock step with him: “97 to 98 per cent of all the climate scientists in the world, who most actively publish in this field, agree”, he said, rushing over the pesky subordinate clause.

Forget that the day before his 24-hour show, news came that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dr Ivar Giaever had resigned from the American Physical Society in disgust over climate alarmism.

“I cannot live with the statement,” published by the society that evidence of man-made global warming is ‘incontrovertible’,” he said.

“The claim is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.”

Forget that eminent MIT atmospheric physicist Dr Richard Lindzen, an IPCC lead author, who accuses Gore of “shrill alarmism”, wrote this year that: “The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth. This is not to say that disasters will not occur; they always have occurred and this will not change in the future.

Forget that Gore has been labelled “a gross alarmist” by one of the world’s foremost meteorologists, hurricane forecaster Dr William Gray.

Gore doesn’t care. He just forges on.

And it seems Gore has a particular affection for Australia, which featured prominently in the 24-hour presentation.

Local presenter Vanessa Morris was billed grandly as “founding Executive Officer of SEE-Change, a sustainability movement based in the Australian capital city of Canberra.”

A one-time ABC radio producer, Morris displayed a photo of the Kremlin.

“This image really amazes me,” she gushed.

“I always think of the Red Square as being freezing but here we have bushfire smoke.”

Mirabile dictu, it’s not always winter in Moscow.

Then Morris moved on to Queensland’s floods and Victoria’s bushfires.

“We are resilient, capable and amazing people,” she intoned.

“But this is much more extreme than ever before.”

Al Gore popped up next, sitting on a couch with young Americans.

“Of course,” he told them, “Australia’s in the midst of a fierce political battle now and some of the climate denier groups in the US and UK that get money from the large climate polluters have been financing trips to Australia and speaking tours by climate deniers.”

Gore’s timing was exquisite. Just as the Gillard-Greens Coalition government introduced its carbon tax legislation into parliament last week, Gore’s show reminded us exactly how feeble is its justification.

Cheap, readily available electricity has been the essential tool of civilisation and human progress.

The carbon tax is about taking away that tool from a wised-up public, against its will.

Proof that the carbon tax is intrinsically anti-democratic was provided last week by economist Henry Ergas, who has discovered several sneaky “poison pills” embedded in the legislation which make it very difficult for a future government to unwind it.

Chief among them is the granting of legal “property rights” to anyone who buys an emission permit.

Then there is the unfettered power of the new carbon regulator, the Climate Change Authority.

If a new government wants to reject its recommended emissions reduction targets, it has to secure a parliamentary majority. If that is not possible, then emissions are automatically cut by up to 10 per cent in a single year, “crippling economic activity”.

Little Australia has rushed lemming-like ahead of the rest of the world, exceeding even Al Gore’s expectations. No wonder he loves us.

COMMUTERS could be hit with public transport fare increases of up to $150 a year when the carbon tax kicks in, confidential state government figures show.

Fears of fare rises came as retail giant David Jones' boss Paul Zahra yesterday blamed consumer concerns about the carbon tax, the high Australian dollar and the federal government's flood levy for a record 12 per cent sales slump.

The federal government claimed the overall cost-of-living impact on prices from the tax would be only 0.7 per cent of CPI.

However the NSW Treasury estimated that the potential fare rises for all modes of public transport in NSW alone - due to increased electricity costs for trains and fuel costs for buses and ferries - could be expected at an average 3.4 per cent.Some fare increases would be expected to be hit from the date of the carbon tax, July 1, 2012 - while others would start in 2013 and 2014...

DEADLY heatwaves are tipped to triple in Melbourne, with each hot blast putting thousands of lives at risk, a government report warns.

Melbourne is the new "epicentre" of heatwaves, with desperate changes needed to combat the silent killer, a government-commissioned report shows, the Herald Sun reports.Community cooling rooms, a "smart grid" that would shut down household appliances to avoid a blackout, and funding to help vulnerable Victorians pay their airconditioning bills are among the proposals.The report says by 2050, more than 1000 people could die in a heatwave similar to Black Saturday unless we change how we deal with extreme heat.The study blames climate change for the forecast increase in heatwaves. It says heat has killed more Australians over the past 200 years than any other natural disasters.Researchers say they are shocked at how many Victorians die because of heat.

PricewaterhouseCoopers principal Roger Beale - who prepared the report alongside the Bureau of Meteorology - said heatwaves would become Melbourne's silent killer."You will get treble the amount of these heat events and up to five times as many dying - so in Melbourne, you could have ... in excess of 1000 people dying in a matter of days," he told the Herald Sun.Mr Beale said due to Victoria's ageing population - combined with higher obesity and diabetes rates - without a proper national heatwave plan more people would die.He said 173 people were killed in the Black Saturday fires, but more than 370 people died from extreme heat in Victoria in the same week.Key recommendations include:• A "SMART grid" that would shut off home appliances to help ensure vulnerable Victorians always have power.• FUNDING to help vulnerable people pay their airconditioning bills.• RESEARCH into community cooling centres.• CHANGES to local planning laws to help keep communities cool, including increasing vegetation.• USE of social media to ensure the sick and elderly are closely monitored.

The report said the Federal Government should provide financial assistance to "certain at-risk groups so they can use their airconditioners without fearing financial stress".PwC's Chris Bennett said some elderly Victorians die because they refuse to use airconditioners for fear they won't be able to pay the bill."If we were told we were going to get one earthquake every 10 years we would spend a billion dollars straight away, and we are going to have these extreme heat events more frequently," he said.

FOLLOWING on from our second wettest year in 2010, 2011 proved wet once again with Australia recording its third wettest year on record.

"Mean rainfall across the country was 699mm, 234mm above the long-term average, and our third-wettest year since national records began in 1900," said Tom Saunders, Senior Meteorologist at The Weather Channel.

"Back-to-back La Niña events led to a two year rainfall total of 1402mm, only a few millimeters off the 1973-74 record of 1407mm."

"The national soaking was mainly due to one of the strongest La Niña's on record which dominated weather patterns across the country early in the year. A second La Niña developed in spring and although weaker, this was associated with above average rain across much of the country during the last few months," Saunders continues.

"Typically La Niña only affects northern and eastern Australia but a record warm eastern Indian Ocean also boosted Western Australia’s rain, particularly during the back half of 2011," says Saunders.

"The increased rain helped to cause slightly below average temperatures and our first colder than average year since 2001. Even though temperatures over the whole country were below average, it was warmer than usual over southern Australia, where the majority of the population live."

"It should be noted Australia was one of the only countries to experience cooler than average temperatures in 2011," he concludes.

The big freeze is not likely to end any time soon, Miller said, with the Arctic air forecast to continue spilling deep into Europe, keeping temperatures well below average and allowing the snow to continue to pile higher and higher.

In Ukraine, the worst-affected country, well over 100 people have died and more than 3,000 have sought hospital treatment.

State news agency Ukrinform said more than 120 ships -- most of them foreign -- were trapped in the Kerch Strait, linking the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea, because of ice.

Parts of the Danube River, one of the most important rivers in Europe for commerce, have nearly frozen over for the first time in 25 years.

That has led at least four countries to halt shipping along sections of the 1,700-mile-long waterway because of the risk of damage to vessels' hulls. The river is also used for drinking water, irrigation and tourism.

The stretch of the Danube running through Romania has been closed indefinitely to traffic, Romanian state television network TVR reported Friday. However, most roads had reopened as of late Thursday, TVR reported, although major problems remain on the country's rail network.

Romania's capital, Bucharest, reached a low of -24 degrees C for the second morning running Friday, its lowest temperature since the cold snap began two weeks ago.

Bucharest has not seen the mercury climb above the 0 degree Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit) freezing point since January 24, Miller said. The average high for this time of year is 3 degrees Celsius (37 degrees Fahrenheit).

Snow is lying 11 inches deep in Bucharest but has piled up even higher to the west, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the capital, Sarajevo, has seen over 39 inches accumulate in the past two weeks, Miller said. A year ago, the city was covered by less than half an inch of snow.

The Balkan Peninsula has been hammered with a series of potent snow storms, the result of a jet stream that has sagged much farther south than normal, allowing storms to pick up moisture over the waters of the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas and dump it on the already frozen landscape of the Balkans, Miller added.

In Serbia, the death toll from the cold snap rose to 16 on Friday, Interior Ministry emergencies official Predrag Maric told Serbian state news agency Tanjug.

The situation has improved, he is quoted as saying, since the government declared a state of emergency in 38 municipalities. Authorities are now focusing on getting food to people in the worst-affected areas, the news agency said.

Five more people died of hypothermia overnight in Poland, according to the Interior Ministry, the website of the publicly funded Polish Radio reported, taking the total number of cold related deaths there to 97.

Turkish Airlines, the national flag carrier for Turkey, canceled 57 domestic and international flights Friday because of severe weather, the semiofficial Anatolian news agency reported.

In a sign of the extreme weather conditions, the city hospital in Split, Croatia, has used two years' supply of plaster in only five days; a result of treating the high number of fractures caused by slips on the snowy and icy terrain, Miller said.

South-east and western Europe can also expect more wintry weather over the weekend.

Italy is braced Friday for heavy snowfall, with more than 40 deaths blamed on the cold snap so far, according to reports.

La Repubblica newspaper said it was expected to be the most difficult weekend for more than a decade, with the icy conditions extending as far south as Calabria.

Schools and offices were closed in Rome as city workers prepared to cope with as much as a foot of snow overnight. The mayor has issued an order requiring drivers to carry snow chains, and extra salt has been stockpiled for use on the roads.

Heavy snowfall a week ago paralyzed roads and trains in many cities across Italy, leading to wide criticism of authorities.

The number of beds available for homeless people in Rome has almost doubled, from 1,300 to 2,500, and new shelters have been set up in many metro stations, which are being kept open overnight, officials said.

The Six Nations rugby match between Italy and England in Rome will go ahead Saturday as planned, English rugby union officials said.

Some weather-related delays and cancellations have been reported at Italian airports. Train services have been suspended in 12 regions, the Corriere della Sera newspaper reported.

The center-north regions of Emilia Romagna, Abruzzo and Marche, where it has been snowing for several days, have been particularly affected by the bad weather. Local trains are suspended.

In the northern Italian city of Trieste, an icy wind is blowing at more than 80 miles per hour and is expected to strengthen, according to the regional civil protection agency. An alert has been issued for strong winds over the next 36 hours, as people in the city report finding it difficult to remain standing in the gusts.

The famous canals of Venice started freezing over this week, preventing gondoliers from plying their trade on the city's picturesque waterways.

Many parts of England and Wales saw snow Thursday night and Friday morning.

Glad you posted this, Brocke...the jet stream has been riding high all winter in the US, so it has been a little warmer.

Been expecting "Big-Gay-Al" Gore to jump on it any day...he may have missed his chance, though.

and then this...

Rome is hit by a second snow storm in a week

The Colosseum is pictured during snowfall in Rome

After no big snowfall for 26 years, Rome was hit by its second snow storm in a week. Heavy snow fell across Italy on Saturday, blanketing the capital Rome, cutting off mountain villages and disrupting roads, railways and airports around the country. The return within days of the heaviest snowfalls in Rome since the 1980s shut sites such as the Colosseum but gave tourists and residents another chance to see landmarks such as Saint Peter's Square and the Trevi fountain dusted with snow.

Trick-cyclists in Blighty and the USA have called for a new "science of communicating science" to be deployed in order to deal with the fact that public concern over global warming has plunged in recent years.

"We need to move on from a sterile debate about whether global warming is happening or not," says Professor Nick Pidgeon of Cardiff uni.

Pidgeon and his fellow psychologist Baruch Fischhoff (of Carnegie Mellon uni in the States) say that instead climate scientists should ally themselves with psychologists and others from the "social and decision sciences" so as to change the public's mind and motivate global action.

The two trick-cyclists indicate that modern psychological methods could help mainstream climate scientists to be much more persuasive than they currently are. They write:Recent advances in behavioural and decision science also tell us that emotion is an integral part of our thinking, perceptions and behaviour, and can be essential for making well-judged decisions ... Emotion creates the abiding commitments needed to sustain action on difficult problems, such as climate change ... appropriately framed emotional appeals can motivate action, given the right supporting conditions (in particular a sense of personal vulnerability, viable ways to act, feelings of personal control and the support of others).

In order to generate these emotions in the public, Fischhoff and Pidgeon suggest the creation of special cross-disciplinary teams comprised of "climate and other experts, decision scientists, social and communications specialists, and programme designers". They write:

In this strategy, social and decision science research provides connections that scientists normally lack.

The two men suggest that these teams would be large and well-funded, along the lines of the RAND Corporation in the States. In the UK, the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research would be a good basis to start from, but it would need to develop "a major focus on communication and decision-making research".

With the aid of their special teams of advisers and decision scientists and communications experts, the climate scientists would avoid falling into obvious traps and perhaps alienating the very public they seek to win over.

Many climate scientists are understandably frustrated by the limited response to what they see as the greatest threat facing our planet. One impulsive response to a seemingly recalcitrant public is a big advertising campaign. However, unless founded on sound social and decision science principles and accompanied by rigorous empirical evaluation, such efforts have little chance of sustained success. Moreover, each communication failure makes future success less likely ... Given the gravity and the complexity of climate-related decisions, we need a new model of science communication.

The proposed new "science of communicating science" would seem to have certain parallels with Isaac Asimov's famous imaginary discipline "Psychohistory", which in his books could be used to predict - and alter - the behaviour of large populations. Admittedly Psychohistory only worked on huge galactic civilisations, and then only if the people being manipulated for their own good were unaware that the science of Psychohistory existed - neither of which are the case here. But it's interesting all the same.

You can read the would-be psychohistorians' paper in full here, courtesy of Nature Climate Change. There's also a statement with canned quotes from Cardiff uni here. Given what day it is, we should note that neither are datelined today.

Oregon State University chemistry professor Nicholas Drapela was fired without warning three weeks ago and has still been given no reason for the university’s decision to “not renew his contract.”

Drapela, an outspoken critic of man-made climate change, worked at the university for 10 years.

In the early years of his career, he published a number of textbooks, received a promotion to senior instructor and, in 2004, received a Loyd F. Carter award for outstanding and inspirational teacher.

In 2007, Drapela began giving talks on his own climate change skepticism. He often and openly questioned the science behind man-made global warming.

Drapela told the Daily Caller he was “blindsided” when the department chair called Drapela into his office to fire him on May 29.

“He read a prepared statement and took my key,” Drapela said, adding that he was given no reason in this meeting as to why he was being let go.

The timing of the termination was odd because Oregon State University was still in session, with finals approaching.

Students were impacted, he told TheDC, because “I was unable to hold office hours in my office because I didn’t have a key.”

It was also odd given that teaching decisions are often made on a hiring cycle, which gives professors ample opportunity to apply to other university teaching positions. The timing of OSU’s decision did not allow Drapela this opportunity, as most open positions had already been filled by the time of his firing.

Since he found out he was being let go, Drapela has pressed the university to give a reason for their decision. He has been transferred from person to person and office to office in the university. When he was able to make an appointment with human resources, HR cancelled an hour before the appointment.

Drapela told TheDC that university officials acted surprised that he wanted to know why he was fired. Speculation has abounded that Drapela was fired for being a global warming critic.

Nasa climate scientists: We said 2014 was the warmest year on record... but we're only 38% sure we were right

Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies claimed its analysis of world temperatures showed ‘2014 was the warmest year on record’

But it emerged that GISS’s analysis is subject to a margin of error

Nasa admits this means it is far from certain that 2014 set a record at all

By David Rose for The Mail on Sunday

Published: 11:43 +11:00, 18 January 2015

The Nasa climate scientists who claimed 2014 set a new record for global warmth last night admitted they were only 38 per cent sure this was true.

In a press release on Friday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) claimed its analysis of world temperatures showed ‘2014 was the warmest year on record’.

The claim made headlines around the world, but yesterday it emerged that GISS’s analysis – based on readings from more than 3,000 measuring stations worldwide – is subject to a margin of error. Nasa admits this means it is far from certain that 2014 set a record at all...

Forget what global warming activists would lead you to believe – 2015 was not even close to the hottest year on record.

Satellite temperature readings going back to 1979 show 1998 was by far the warmest year in the satellite era, followed by 2010. 2015 comes in third. And these results are only for the period since 1979.

2015 should have been warmer. This past year saw what is likely the most powerful El Nino during the satellite temperature record. With a record El Nino, we should have experienced record high temperatures. Yet we didn’t.